Background: Two developmental screening instruments for infants and young children, the Ages & Stages Questionnaires-Third Edition (ASQ-3) and the Ages & Stages Questionnaires: Social-Emotional (ASQ:SE), are widely used in the US and internationally. Both tools are sometimes used concurrently but the relation between children’s scores on the two tools is seldom investigated.

Methods: The Brazilian versions of ASQ-3 and ASQ:SE, known as the ASQ-BR and ASQ:SE-BR, were used for assessing 13,470 children ages one to four in public child daycare centres in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Four groups were defined according to children’s ages as one, two, three, and four year-olds. Correlation and multiple regression were employed to explore the relation between children’s scores on the ASQ-BR and the ASQ:SE-BR.

Results: Results indicated that the domain scores of ASQ-BR, including communication (r = -0.38 to -0.44), gross motor (r = -0.19 to -0.32), fine motor (r = -0.33 to -0.45), problem solving (r = -0.36 to -0.42), and personal-social (r = -0.38 to -0.51) were significantly correlated with ASQ:SE-BR scores. Regression analyses suggested that the communication and personal-social domains were significant predictors of social-emotional scores in most of the age groups.

Conclusion: General developmental assessment is suggested to be conducted with social-emotional screening. If the workload is heavy for administers to use both screeners concurrently, social-emotional screening is recommended for children who fail communication or personal-social domains on developmental screening tests.